writer and journalist

About

Josh is a freelance journalist based in Cambridge, Mass. He is a regular contributor to EurasiaNet and Jane's and his articles also have appeared in Slate, The New York Times,, The Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic, ForeignPolicy.com, Al Jazeera English, The Diplomat, and U.S. News and World Report. He blogs on Eurasian defense and security at The Bug Pit. Follow him on Twitter at @joshuakucera and @TheBugPit, and on Facebook. See more here.

November 24, 2013

I recently had a piece in the international edition of the New York Times on the departure of the U.S. air base from Kyrgyzstan in the context of U.S. policy in Central Asia:

The Pentagon quietly announced last month that the U.S. military is leaving the air base it has operated in Kyrgyzstan as a staging area for American troops and matériel since 2001. While the move will complicate American efforts to wind down the war in Afghanistan, the decision has much broader ramifications: It marks the end of a brief experiment to extend American power and influence into the distant strategic arena of Central Asia.

September 23, 2013

I have had several pieces published recently from a reporting trip I took this spring to Tajikistan (thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting). One is for The Wilson Quarterly, on the proposed Rogun dam project.

Two decades after the demise of the Soviet Union, the region’s five now-independent states have become increasingly isolated from, if not hostile to, one another. Borders have hardened as corrupt governments, focused primarily on extracting as much wealth as they can from their own land and citizens, see no need to cooperate with their neighbors. As the outside world has become more involved in the region, each country has come to see its neighbors as competition for aid, investment, and geopolitical clout. And no two countries are more sharply at odds than Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

“It all started in the 1920s,” said one prominent Tajikistani intellectual when I asked about Rogun...

Another piece, on TheAtlantic.com, is on the conflict between the Pamiri people of Tajikistan's remote east and the country's central government. It erupted last year in a controversial military operation by Tajikistan's U.S.-backed special forces.

Just before dawn on July 24 of last year, the government of Tajikistan began a military operation in the small town of Khorog on the Afghanistan border. According to the government, the attack was targeted at four leaders of criminal groups involved in drug smuggling from Afghanistan, who were suspected of killing a local security official. It was the kind of operation the U.S. - worried about instability on Afghanistan's northern border - has been training and equipping Tajikistan's special forces units to carry out.

But to the people of Khorog, the operation looked very different. The scale of the attack - using helicopters, mortars, and the country's most elite soldiers - was clearly far beyond what was necessary to capture four men. Snipers on the mountains that rise steeply above the town shot at civilians. Phone and internet were cut off. One local civil society leader described huddling with his family in an interior room in his apartment; venturing to a window he saw the bodies of three neighbors - and a soldier's gun pointed at his window. "After that I understood: this wasn't between those leaders and the government, but between the government and the people," he recalled.

And finally, a dispatch from Murghab, on Tajikistan's border with China, on Roads and Kingdoms:

“This is the worst place in the world.”

I was in Murghab, Tajikistan, and although I don’t like to make blanket judgments like that, I could see his point. The restaurant we were in was pleasant and cozy, but I had had to flee into it to escape the whipping wind, hail and bitter cold of the late May day. My walk around the town had presented an unrelentingly bleak landscape. Abandoned houses with collapsed whitewashed walls that exposed the mud brick underneath. Women with scarves wrapped around their entire head—only a small slit for the eyes—against the wind and dust. Trash everywhere, including a disconcerting amount of animal parts—feet, horns, clumps of fur.

I had come to Murghab because of where it sits on the map: on the borders of China and Afghanistan in the Pamir Mountains, the furthest reach of the Russian/Soviet empire. Between the geopolitical tectonic plates of Russia and China, Murghab feels like a fault line.

March 04, 2013

I have a new piece at The Wilson Quarterly on democracy in the former Soviet Union:

With its inspiring images of citizens around the Middle East taking to the streets to demand an end to dictatorship, the Arab Spring rekindled our faith in democracy. As the dramatic events unfolded on television, it was impossible not to believe that however tightly autocrats may try to hold on to power, and however messy transitions may be, in the end, despotism must yield to the will of the people.

But a look to the east and north, toward the former Soviet Union, provides a sobering reminder that democracy is not the inevitable result after dictatorships fall. The 15 former Soviet republics have seen dictatorial regimes ousted in not one but two distinct waves—the first after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the second a dozen or more years later in the so-called color revolutions that brought down autocrats in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Yet no real benefits have accrued to political and civil rights in the region; indeed, they are more limited than before. (The three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, are exceptions; not absorbed into the Soviet Union until 1940, all three have become democracies and members of the European Union.) Freedom House, an American organization that promotes the advancement of democracy worldwide, produces annual measures of political and civil freedoms in every country. According to its data, only two of the ex-Soviet republics outside of the Baltics—Georgia and Moldova—have better scores today than they did when they gained independence in 1991. Armenia’s have not changed. The scores of the other nine states have gone backward.

Two leading scholars on democratization, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, of Harvard and the University of Toronto, respectively, have written that “expectations (or hopes)” for democracy in the former Soviet Union have “proved overly optimistic,” and that it may be “time to stop thinking of these cases in terms of transitions to democracy and to begin thinking about the specific types of regimes they actually are.” And that was in 2002. Yet U.S. officials still cling to the notion that the region is in a “transition” to democracy. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a visit in 2011 to Uzbekistan and its president, Islam Karimov, one of the harshest dictators on the planet and perhaps the least likely leader in the region to move anywhere close to democracy, a State Department official told reporters on the trip that “President Karimov commented that he wants to make progress on liberalization and democratization, and he said that he wants to leave a legacy of that for his—both his kids and his grandchildren.” Pressed by an incredulous reporter, the official added, “Yeah. I do believe him.”

January 31, 2013

Last August, a statue of Heydar Aliyev, who ruled Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003, was erected along Mexico City's grand Paseo de la Reforma, in a park renamed the “Mexico-Azerbaijan Friendship Park.” Around the same time, the Azerbaijani government built a second monument in a different park in memory of Azeri villagers killed by Armenian forces in 1992; the plaque in front of the statue refers to the massacre as a “genocide.” Azerbaijan had renovated both public spaces at a cost of about $5.4 million.

The inauguration of the Aliyev monument was attended by several top Mexican government officials, including the mayor. But the Mexican public, then engrossed in a presidential election campaign, paid little attention to a statue of a man who once led a country 8,000 miles away.

When the nouveau riche attempt to use their money to buy respect and prestige, it often backfires. Such was the case of the Azerbaijani government’s effort to honor its former president. Because once Mexico City residents became aware of the statue that had risen in their midst, they saw the effort for what it was: an authoritarian government clumsily trying to buy influence and whitewash the legacy of a dictator.﻿

Read the whole thing here. And if you'd prefer to read it in Russian, it's translated by inosmi.ru here.

September 25, 2012

In a bit of a departure from my regular journalism work, I have written a research paper on U.S. military aid to Central Asia, published today by the Open Society Foundations. Among the findings:

U.S. training and equipping aid focuses on special forces, including OMON and Alfas, and on occasions when those forces may have acted in ways contrary to stated U.S. interests, U.S. officials have tended to not take an active role in investigating those incidents and continue to support those units.

The pattern of aid shows a clear pattern in which the aid increases when Afghanistan is a high priority in Washington, right after the September 11, 2001 attacks and in 2007-8, when U.S. focus again began to turn from Iraq to Afghanistan. That (among other evidence) suggests the aid is intended less as assistance for Central Asian security forces, than as a form of payment for those countries' cooperation in the war in Afghanistan.

U.S. claims that the aid is intended to foster the promotion of human rights by Central Asian security forces has been undercut by the decision to resume military aid to Uzbekistan. “It makes the people mad that we do anything with them. They say, ‘Really? Here [in Kyrgyzstan] you talk about human rights, they’re [in Uzbekistan] not so good at it,’” said a U.S. military official currently working on security cooperation with Central Asia. “The desire to work with people outweighs the desire to do the right thing sometimes.”

June 23, 2012

I have a new piece in Foreign Policy on the slow, but real, militarization of the Caspian Sea:

While the world focuses on the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran, a little-noticed arms buildup has been taking place to Iran's north, among the ex-Soviet states bordering the Caspian. Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union created three new states on the sea, their boundaries have still not been delineated. And with rich oil and natural gas fields in those contested waters, the new countries -- Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan -- are using their newfound riches to protect the source of that wealth. So they're building new navies from scratch, while the two bigger powers, Russia and Iran, are strengthening the navies they already have. It all amounts to something that has never before been seen on the Caspian: an arms race.

May 28, 2012

I have a new piece on Slate about Azerbaijan's hosting of the Eurovision song contest, and the various complications that Baku has had to deal with as a result:

Baku, the petrocapital on the shore of the Caspian Sea, has been designed under the principle that too much is never enough. Its newest monument is the Flame Towers, a set of three flame-shaped buildings on a hill overlooking the entire city, with LED lights that at night alternate between animations of a flickering fire and a figure waving an Azerbaijani flag. Close by is a TV tower bathed in iridescent purple light. Below that is what was, for a short time, the world's largest flagpole. Baku is kitschy, brash, and over the top.

In other words, it's the perfect place to host the Eurovision Song Contest.

Read the whole thing here. And a video of the Flame Towers with flag-waving animation:

November 02, 2011

I have had a couple of new stories on The Atlantic's website over the last week. One is on Russian fears over the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan:

When the U.S. starts its scheduled troop pullout from Afghanistan in 2014, it will represent the end of America's bloody decade-plus engagement there, and the fading away of Americans' attention to Central Asia. But to Russians, 2014 instead marks a beginning: when Afghanistan becomes their problem again.

But hope may be the only thing driving on the New Silk Road. The State Department has few good options in Afghanistan, and the U.S. doesn't want to leave (or at least wants to seem like they won't leave) a disaster behind once it starts pulling troops out in 2014. So it cast about for ideas and found the New Silk Road proposal, which had been bouncing around the post-Soviet think tank circuit in Washington since the mid-oughts.

August 15, 2011

ASTANA, Kazakhstan—If Guinness were to keep a record of Greatest Number of Heads of State To Attend the Opening of a Shopping Mall, it's safe to assume that the standard was set last summer at the grand opening of the Khan Shatyr in Astana, the capital ofKazakhstan.

To be sure, this was not an ordinary mall. The Khan Shatyr (its name means king's tent in Kazakh) is a spectacular, shimmering silver structure sweeping up from the steppe. Designed by celebrated British architect Norman Foster to evoke the nomadic tradition that is only a couple of generations removed from today's Kazakhs, at 500 feet tall it qualifies—in a record that apparently does exist—as the tallest tent in the world.

Its inauguration was several years behind schedule and had been eagerly anticipated as the most impressive addition (to date, anyway) to this city that has sprouted up, with improbable speed and verve, here in the middle of nowhere. But it was not contemporary architecture that attracted the heads of state, including Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, King Abdullah of Jordan, Abdullah Gul of Turkey, and the presidents of Ukraine, Tajikistan, and Armenia.

The date of the Khan Shatyr's opening also happened to be the 70th birthday of Kazakhstan's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who hosted the other six heads of state at the gala. Nazarbayev's 20-year rule has made extensive use of the grand spectacle. And although he is sensitive to the perception that he is fostering a cult of personality and had said publicly that he did not want an elaborate celebration for his 70th, it was obvious that this event was, implicitly, a birthday party....

Kazakhstan's history and geography would not seem to provide the ingredients for becoming a rising power. It's stuck in a location that is about as out of the way as you can get, in between Siberia, far western China, and the other 'stans. Kazakhs are traditionally nomads whose language wasn't written until the 19th century, and today the country's population stands at less than 16 million.

In spite of all those disadvantages, Kazakhstan is both far more modern and more dynamic than people think. But it is also highly sensitive about how it's seen abroad. Kazakhstan's effort to rope so many world leaders into attending a mall opening is of a piece with its ambitious—often shameless—desire to take a place on the world stage.